Man who made threat calls to Pooja Bhatt held

A 28-year-old man was arrested by the Bandra police on Saturday for having made obscene and threatening phone calls to Bollywood producer and actor Pooja Bhatt.

| TNN | Jan 13, 2013, 02.34 AM IST

MUMBAI: A 28-year-old man was arrested by the Bandra police on Saturday for having made obscene and threatening phone calls to Bollywood producer and actor Pooja Bhatt.

The accused, Ashish Swarnakar, resides in Pune and is employed with a cellphone service provider outlet. He claims to have procured the phone numbers of Pooja and her father, filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt, from a friend, Dhruv, who is a music composer. A metropolitan court released Swarnakar on a cash bail of Rs 15,000 on Saturday.

Pooja had approached the Bandra police with a complaint on January 9 after having received three phone calls from an unknown number on the evening of January 8. Her father, too, received a call from the same number but did not answer it as his cellphone was on silent mode.

"The motive is yet to be ascertained, but prima facie it appears that Swarnakar wanted to harass Pooja and Mahesh Bhatt. He doesn't have a criminal record," said zonal DCP Pratap Dighavkar. Swarnakar admitted that he made the phone calls to Pooja Bhatt in a drunken state. The police traced Swarnakar on the basis of his cellphone location. He kept moving places for the past two days and also switched off his handset at times making it hard to trace him, police said.

When TOI contacted Pooja she said she couldn't believe that Swarnakar got the numbers from a music composer. "It's possible that he got my number from the organization where he was employed," she said.

"The law in India is such that men like him get to walk free soon after attempting to terrorize women. We need to publish his picture and shame him so that he never repeats this act with another woman," the actor-filmmaker said.

She added that it seemed that there were two or three other people in the room the night she got the calls. "Whether Dhruv was one of them who passed on our numbers to Swarnakar, needs to be verified," she said.

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